If you’re thinking of selling your home, or even if you’ve already put your home up for sale, there are steps you can take to ensure the best possible price for your home. This article from U.S. News outlines nine factors that can keep you from getting the best price.
When you put your house on the market, it goes without saying that you want the best price when it sells. But many sellers shoot themselves in the foot, doing things that will torpedo their home’s selling price and net them less money. Plus, there are certain home and neighborhood characteristics that all the staging in the world can’t overcome, once again dragging down the price.
In a really hot market, or in certain desirable areas, as Redfin Chief Economist Nela Richardson puts it, “any house standing upright can get a bid.” But she also notes that Redfin’s new Housing Demand Index shows that home sales are slowing.
“What we’ve seen is that the market has changed dramatically in the last two months,” Richardson says. “Prices are slowing considerably.”
While inventory of homes for sale is still low and many buyers are still looking for homes, they’re not willing to pay just any price. “They’re making more conservative decisions,” Richardson says. “What our agents are telling a lot of buyers is just wait.”
“Sellers are still firmly in control, but they’re not getting a free pass,” Richardson says.
By far, the biggest mistake sellers make is to set their home price too high, thinking would-be buyers will offer a lower price and they can use that as the starting point for negotiations. “If you misprice it in the beginning, it can tend to languish, and you may end up selling it for less than you would have if you had priced it correctly to begin with,” says Kevin Brown Jr., president of Praedium Real Estate Services in Pittsburgh. Homes that are overpriced tend to stay on the market longer, which makes buyers suspicious that there is something wrong with the home. “Right now, people are expecting they will receive multiple offers, and their house will sell for over asking price, no matter what,” says Sabrina Booth, an agent with Redfin in Seattle. “They tend to shy away from houses that come on the market overpriced. We’re seeing less competition at this time.”
Nearly all home shoppers these days start their searches online, and they decide which homes they want to see based on the photos posted with the listing. Not surprisingly, blurry cellphone shots don’t draw much interest. “People just skip over it,” says Matt Francis, branch manager of Better Homes and Gardens Mason-McDuffie Real Estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. “The millennial buyer is not interested in what it can become.”
In these days of instant gratification, home shoppers want to see homes as soon as possible and at their convenience. If you make your home difficult to show, fewer prospects will see it, and it can take you longer to find a buyer. “If you don’t show it, you can’t sell it,” Francis says.
If your house is messy, your yard is unkempt and the windows are grimy, it is not going to put its best foot forward. Most buyers will have a hard time getting past that initial negative first impression, and failing to clean up your home could cost you a lot of money.
